| Here are some snapshots from my trip to the FIRST 2008 Championship April 17-19 in Atlanta, Georgia, which included the FLL World Festival, FTC (Vex) World Championship, new FTC Showcase competitions, and the FRC Championship. |
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| The calm before the storm. Representatives from LEGO and
TheNXTStep set up the LEGO booth before the crowd arrives in force.
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| Team Formula Green from Israel and team TECHNO Future Egypt from
Egypt practice side-by-side at one of the practice tables in the pits.
Despite the tense looks in this picture (robot worries), the teams were
of course very nice to each other, as were all teams in attendance.
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| Team SAP SpIDERS from India had one the longest flights to get to
Atlanta (20 hours).
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| The Power Peeps from Michigan take a pizza break in their pits.
This team and their cheering section was huge and very spirited.
It seemed that wherever you looked, you kept seeing their green and pink
shirts. Like many of the teams, they brought fun give-away items
to hand out from their pit. The Power Peeps went on to win the 3rd
place Champion's award.
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| The Fire Breathing Rubber Duckies from Oregon in their pit. I
half expected to see a kiddie pool full of water in their pit.
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| The six pairs of FLL Competition tables on the floor of the Georgia
Dome somehow manage to look very small.
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| The LEGO booth had a table with several NXT and RCX models to play
with. Some of them shot balls or missiles, which was of course a
huge hit. The RCX in the middle is balancing like a Segway.
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| The LEGO Education booth had several models on display including the
3-Speed
Transmission with Clutch from
www.nxtprograms.com.
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| Once the FLL competition area got full of teams competing, setting
up, scoring afterwards, and queuing up, the tables almost disappeared
from sight.
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| The Lego Guards from Northern California and Formula Green from
Israel face each other off and stare each other down with their fingers
on the start buttons, while the rest of the crowd scrambled in panic and
ran for cover. The teams are waiting for the "LEGO" signal to
start the race to their side of the solar powered satellite mission and
compete for the 10 point bonus for getting there first.
Unfortunately for Formula Green, they didn't have much of a chance on
this one. The Lego Guards fit a special drive system custom made
for only this mission that makes their robot go about 5 times faster
than normal, and that's just to leap out of the base area. Once
out of base, the robot quickly extends a huge articulating arm toward
the target, resulting in a total time to the target of only about 1/2
second.
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| The FLL competition ran three pairs of tables simultaneously, while
the other three pairs of tables de-briefed their scores and set up the
next teams in parallel, so the announcers were bouncing from table to
table trying to introduce the teams and follow a fraction of the action.
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| The video screen above the FLL tables for the crowds showed a
fish-eye view of both sides of each of the three pairs of tables
competing and a larger image to the right that switched around from
table to table. Unfortunately, you couldn't see anything in the
fish-eye views, you had no idea which team you were looking at on the
right hand view, and the video was almost never in sync with the
announcer's fragmented play-by-play. This obviously took a lot of
production work to put on, but unfortunately was of little benefit to
the spectators. :-( And with all the people
crowded around the tables, you couldn't see much of anything in person
either. So it remains a future challenge to figure out how to make
an FLL event at this level a better spectator sport...
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| The Sizars team from South Korea had an elaborate booth full of
educational information and even included choreographed dances to music
for everyone's entertainment.
Unlike the FRC pits, where teams kept busy fixing robot damage between rounds, and the FTC pits where many teams kept working and tweaking, almost none of the FLL teams did anything with their robots or programs in the pit area. They were all "done" with their technical work when they got to Atlanta, and the pit area was basically a huge multi-cultural outreach party.
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| The Lego Guards talk with technical judges during a technical
"callback". After the formal design interviews, some teams got
visited by the judges in their pits to explain more of their work.
Robin Moss, the team's head programmer, explains printouts of their
NXT-G programs from a binder. The Lego Guards went on to win the
1st place Programming award.
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| The Lego Guard's robot waits patiently in the pits between rounds,
all alone, with no Formula 1-style pit crew scrambling all over it with
spare parts and tools. This robot can consistently score 400
points, and the AA lithium batteries last a long time, so nothing to
do...
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| All of FLL team pit areas had displays with information about where
they are from, their research project, etc. This nice display board from
the Lego Guards was quite tame by World Festival standards. Some
teams went all out with multiple displays, maps, flags, videos,
elaborate decorations, LEGO models, give-aways, and even some games you
could come in and play.
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| The FLL competition area was a very colorful place when crowded with
teams. There's that green Power Peeps team again queued up at the
right rear, dancing together even when just waiting in line!
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| The Green Man Group team performs an interesting musical number in
their pits with a synthesizer and three sets of tuned percussion pipes
made out of PVC pipes. This team won the 1st place Robot
Performance Award with a perfect three out of three 400 point rounds.
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| The Lego Guards meet and talk with FLL Engineer Scott Evans in the
pit area.
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| This robot caught my eye due to its mechanical coolness.
I'm not sure, but I think this one belonged to team SWAT from Illinois.
Sorry I didn't get more cool FLL robot pictures, but actually not many
robots were out where you could see them in the pit area.
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| After the FLL teams were all done and packing up, robotics expert
Steve Hassenplug sneaks up to a practice table and quietly puts on a
demonstration to a couple of adult enthusiasts and one lucky young
bystander showing how it is possible to score something like 240 points
in 4 seconds with a simple RCX robot that drives straight forward once.
Well, relatively simple, it has a couple of tricks up its sleeve...
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| The Lego Guards with their 1st place Programming trophy. Left
to right, coach Alan LeVezu, Gavin Owens, Karl LeVezu, Alejandro Vega,
Justin Demma, Robin Moss, and assistant coach Heidi Buck.
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| A typical Vex FTC robot, in its pit area. The Vex kit is being
replaced by a new kit for next year in FTC (see below).
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| A practice area for the FTC Vex robots "Quad Quandary" challenge in
the FTC pit area.
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| A complex (and colorful!) Vex robot. I wonder what a robot of
this complexity would weigh if constructed with the types of parts in
the new FTC kit (see below).
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| The LEGO Education booth showed a simple example robot built with
the new FTC kit, which is combination of various parts from different
manufacturers, including LEGO (see next picture below). This robot
is missing the fingers on the claw that should be attached to the servo
motors at the ends of the arm.
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| The new FTC kit, in beta form, includes a LEGO MINDSTORMS Education
NXT base set (complete with the NXT brain, the 3 NXT motors, the
sensors, the plastic Technic parts, etc), a small assortment of custom
made metal parts (aluminum I assume), including heavy duty gears, and
angle irons with a unique pattern of holes, tubes and various brackets,
4 strong drive motors, 4 small servo motors, an external controller and
interfaces that allow the NXT to control the non-LEGO motors and
multiplex the sensors into one port, extra NXT-compatible sensors,
rechargeable batteries, a USB game controller designed to connect to a
laptop which then controls the robot wirelessly via Bluetooth, and three
programming software packages to choose from: NXT-G, Robot C, and
LabView.
Lacking from the Beta kit are any stand-alone rotation sensors or shaft encoders that would allow you to count rotations on the strong drive motors, which makes autonomous driving difficult. One showcase team member that I talked to was hopeful and confident that these would be added to the kit before it became official. The new FTC Showcase teams were allowed to use only parts in this kit for their demo competition, which severely limited their designs, but presumably future FTC teams will be allowed to add parts. Click here for a hi-res version of the above photo.
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| Most of the new FTC Showcase teams combined the plastic LEGO and
metal parts from the kit in their robots.
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| Here is a close-up that shows the external motor controller and
sensor multiplexer, the strong drive motors, heavy duty gears and
brackets.
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| Also included in the kit are some special brackets that are designed
to interface the LEGO parts to the metal parts. The white brackets
above have Technic-compatible peg holes going one way and machine screw
holes going the other way.
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| Here is the playing field for the new FTC Showcase demo competition.
Robots needed to pick up objects, climb the ramps, place objects on
targets at the top of the ramps, pick up other objects and place them in
the appropriate plastic bins on the side, and climb the mountain of wood
blocks to find and/or place other scoring objects. Climbing the ramps was difficult, and some robots fell off, such as the one in the upper-left above, rendering them dead for the rest of the match. Climbing the wood blocks also seemed very hard, and I didn't see any of them really attempt much of it. Every robot that I saw used the same drive train technique: 4-wheel drive skid steer (I guess due to the climbing nature of the challenge and the parts provided), which made the robots somewhat hard to control precisely. The Showcase challenge seemed difficult, relative to the teams' ability to build robots using only parts provided in the beta kit, and in the time they had to work on it with limited access to a competition field. Several matches that I watched resulted in zero points on both sides. The challenge started with an autonomous portion before the remote-control driven portion started, and most teams I saw did nothing during that period, and of those that tried to do something, I never saw any score any points. Several teams also had trouble with their Bluetooth connections and other technical difficulties. Overall, the new FTC kit looks promising as an idea, and the teams that I talked to preferred it to the Vex kit, but it has a ways to go and will require several improvements, and will also need additional parts to make good robots that slot effectively between FLL and FRC. As difficult as the Showcase challenge was, given the scores that were achieved here with the beta FTC kit, I actually think all-LEGO (NXT/Technic) robots could have done just as well using currently available remote controls and motor multiplexers...
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| Ken Johnson, director of FTC (center in red shirt), shows the new
FTC challenge to Dean Kamen and some LEGO executives.
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| A professional-looking FRC pit. The team members were all out
crowding around the video monitors to see the results of the alliance
selection at the time.
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| Space is very tight in the FRC pits, with barely enough room for the
robot, some parts and tools, and a few people to get their hands on it.
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| The FRC competition was split up into four different regions, each
with their own competition field (the one pictured was named Galileo),
with the winning alliance from each area going on to the semi-finals.
Unlike the FLL competitions, which were hard to see, the view of the FRC
rounds was great and very exciting to watch.
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| Sparks fly in an FRC pit as a team member machines a part. Everyone
in the FRC pit area had to wear safety goggles, spectators included (you
could borrow them at the pit entrance).
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| Safety goggles are not enough to keep you from getting grabbed or
stabbed by a robot being tested in the FRC pit area... Teams
needed to be careful at all times and wandering spectators needed to
stay alert. The team member above keeps the robot jaws away from
the crowd.
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| The FRC teams shipped their robots to the competition in big crates
with the help of FedEx, one of the sponsors.
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| The FRC robots that I saw showed a wide variety of drive train
strategies, and several examples are shown in the pictures below.
This one uses two-wheel differential drive with additional skidding
front and back wheels for balance.
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| This one used two-wheel differential drive with castor wheels in the
front and rear.
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| This one used car-style rear wheel drive with pivoting front wheels.
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| This one used six-wheel drive skid steer. I also saw another
one with eight-wheel drive skid steer (not pictured).
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| This one had two main drive wheels in the center, two additional
driven Omni wheels in the front (rolling perpendicular rollers around
the perimeter of the Omni wheel allow it to drag sideways easily when
the robot turns), and two additional non-driven Omni wheels in the back.
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| This one turned by applying power to a pair of transverse-mounted
Omni wheels that pushed the robot side to side when driven but otherwise
just dragged on the rollers when going straight.
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| A few teams that I saw used or made their own special "Mecanum" Omni
wheels where the rollers where mounted diagonally around the drive
wheels, which allows the robot to move in any direction without
pivoting, given different input speeds and directions to the four
wheels.
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| Some FRC teams such as team 241 "The Pink Team" used CAD software to
design some of their metal parts, which were then cut by automated
machinery, resulting in impressing-looking custom parts.
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| This was my favorite FRC robot, team 1114 Simbotics, from Ontario
Canada (picture taken from the
Simbotics web site), which ended up in the winning alliance.
Aside from being fast, precise, stable and well balanced, and having a
great ball handler and launcher, it had outstanding autonomous
performance. It was able to consistently make a full lap around
the track and change lanes as necessary to knock both of its balls off
of the overpass during the semi-autonomous period.
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| An outside area between the competition and pit buildings allowed
some team members to catch some sun, play Frisbee or football, etc.
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| The Georgia Dome housed all of the competition fields, with four FRC
tracks, a set of four FTC (Vex) fields, and the six pairs of FLL tables.
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| The weather was beautiful, and teams enjoyed lounging outside during
the social/party times.
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| A large Ice Cream Social gave out free ice cream and other treats to
teams outside in the Centennial Olympic Park.
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| Several FLL teams had prepared dance routines to entertain the crowd
at the outdoor social. It's those Power Peeps again, all making
the hand sign for Michigan.
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| One of the teams from Germany got the whole crowd to join in to
their foot-stomping dance.
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| FLL Engineer and Uber-Geek Scott Evans eats ice cream with one hand
while simultaneously solving a Rubik's cube with the other.
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| Many buildings in downtown Atlanta suffered blown out windows from
the recent tornado. With the temporary plywood applied, some of
them looked like digital art, or something from the
Game of
Life.
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| The view from my room on the 38th floor of the Marriot Marquis
hotel.
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| The buildings at the competition site (Georgia Dome and World
Congress Center) had glass and other damage from the recent tornado.
There was lots of construction going on while we were there, and there
was obviously a lot of work put into cleaning up and temporarily
buttoning up beforehand.
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| The recent tornado appeared to have slammed this old Cadillac into a building, but it was just the Hard Rock Cafe, which was a popular late night dinner spot for the FRC teams, with long lines outside and waits of over an hour. |
| The Finale party on Saturday had a large number of inflatable games
for team members to play.
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| Two team members burning off some steam in a very fun-looking
inflatable boxing game.
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| The party also had several carnival-style games with prizes.
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| The Finale party had the largest outdoor catered dinner that I have
ever been to.
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| Fortunately the weather cooperated for the party on Saturday.
Early forecasts were showing scattered thunderstorms, but they didn't
materialize.
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| At the Finale party, a new tradition was started. FRC teams
were asked to volunteer to enter their robot in an outdoor "Asphalt
challenge", which was a simple drag race of about 100 feet. Nine
FRC teams volunteered their robots for the race. The normally rigorous FIRST safety protocols seemed to not apply to this event... The crowd was lined tightly along the sides of the race (like a rally race) with no barrier on one side and minimal barriers on the other side. A few robots veered ominously into the crowd as people jumped out of the way. A few brave team members stood directly in the path of the robots to time them or take pictures. Ironically, probably the only two people who didn't need a helmet were the drivers, situated safely behind the starting barrier, but on this team they wore them just for decoration!
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| Some of the teams for the FRC Asphalt Challenge stripped their robots down to just the drive train to make them lighter and faster. |
